With the rise of crime in South Africa, companies need to be more vigilant when it comes to allowing visitor or staff member into a complex, with more criminals trying to gain access to properties these days with more intricate methods, it can be important to have better ways of managing entry and exit points in a complex, estate or business.
What you should look for in the access control system:
With regards to access control systems. What you need as a business is to do the following before just purchasing a system.
- Identify the specific needs and requirements of your organisation.
Getting a system in the first place means that you area having a problem with access control and system monitoring. So first gain an idea of what you are wanting to allow users access to and what type of metrics you are wanting to track.
For instance, if you are an estate manager, you might want to track the hours of the day visitors are visiting, and there drivers licenses and car number plates. Or maybe you just want there car license plates. Then do you want the gate to be interlinked to the same system, so that guards can open the gate from the same scanning device?
- Consider the size and complexity of your organisation.
When it comes to access control systems, companies won’t want to be spending large amounts of money on a system for a very small need. When it comes to an estate gatehouse, they might need a very limited access control system, that allows users to be scanned in and out, and open the gate for them.
Or maybe they might want a system that can do that, but also scan gardeners in and out too, as well as scanning in and out visitors. Depending on the level of complexity that the estate or company desires, this will determine a large part of what type of system should be purchased.
- Consider the different access control authentication options
With access control systems, some systems require a tag, some require a card, some require a hand print. All of these authentication options can be switched out in most cases, but when it comes to the new generation methods, companies like apple have done it well with having hotel keys being able to be opened with just the wallet app.
Onguard has it’s own very similar system to this, which is through a phones NFC, so with the new app that will be rolling out in 2023, we intend to allow users access with just there phone. No need for a tag or key card.
- Consider the scalability of the system
When looking into access control systems, one must make sure that they are looking into systems that will not just last a long time, but in the future be upgradable, scalable and effective at its job. With products from Identiscan, they are all interlinked and can be viewed from one cohesive management portal.
This means that even when switching products, all previous information is still kept and the management team can retain all its data from over the years. Which can be important for estates or companies wanting to track users.
- Look at the cost of the overall system
The final barrier to access control systems are the costs involved in them. With higher end systems, they can start costing tens of thousands of rands, while systems like the NFC access tags from identiscan can cost in the hundreds of rands, and still have major features that most of the most expensive systems don’t even have.
With the tag NFC system, the scanning device is the users phone, and thereby takes the most expensive part of the access control system out of the equation. When the tag is scanned and the user is doing so in the allotted time slot, there is a device that is connected to the gate to allow access.
More expensive systems will have a device the guard uses, but with less expensive systems, this can be done with a user owned device.
Hopefully this guide has presented you with some new ideas about what type of system you’d like for your complex, estate or business. But overall we at Onguard hope that you might find our systems satisfactory for your business needs.
Check out our new Identiscan website as well, to see all our new systems for 2023.